


Ain't No Mountain High Enough

by SylvanWitch



Series: Ain't No Mountain High Enough [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Dirty Talk, Enemies to Lovers, Light Angst, M/M, Post-Avengers (2012)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-05
Updated: 2017-09-05
Packaged: 2018-12-24 10:49:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12011160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: When Steve and Tony wake up on a mountain in the middle of nowhere with nothing but the clothes they had on and each other, they have two choices:  Come to terms or die.  Well, okay, there might be athirdoption...





	Ain't No Mountain High Enough

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place in a hand-wavy, post- _Avengers_ time-space. Make of it what you will.
> 
> Also, thanks to the great folks at the Write Every Day Challenge on DW, who've been enormously motivating in bringing this story to the page.

“Look, I know this isn’t your idea of a good time.  I know you don’t trust me or even like me.  But we have a mutual problem here, and if we don’t work on it together, at least one of us will be in serious trouble.”

Out of the suit and dressed only in black cotton lounge pants and a grease-smudged wife-beater, Tony Stark didn’t look like a billionaire superhero.  His bare feet were bleeding and filthy, the cuff of his pants mud-spattered, and his shirt was dark with sweat.  In places, it stuck to him where the blood had dried.

They were without comms, sans suit or shield, and in the middle of godforsaken nowhere.  There was a neat line, already healing, on Steve’s collarbone where his subdermal tracker had been.  Stark had a twin wound pressing parallel red lines into the fabric of his shirt.  The site looked angry, probably infected.

They’d been on the move for six hours, having come to side by side in a woodland clearing lit by weak morning sun, and it was probably his imagination, but it seemed to Steve that even Stark’s arc reactor was glowing more dimly than it had been when this whole disaster had started.

All of these observations took only seconds for Steve to make; he might have been asleep beneath the ice for decades, but his recon skills were as fresh today as they had been in 1945.

Steve Rogers considered Stark wordlessly, letting the silence do the speaking for him.  It had been his limited experience thus far that letting Stark rattle on led to a better result than trying to find an answer that would shut him up.  Eventually he’d wind down and let Steve say something salient.

If only Steve had something salient he could say.  All his brain kept coming up with were worst case scenarios, and as they already seemed to be occupying one, the visions of mountain lions and invading aliens weren’t helping a damned bit.

“…maybe it’s for the best.”

Steve realized he’d lost the thread of Stark’s rant when he saw that the latter’s expression had shifted from indignant arrogance to a kind of resigned wryness.  There was white around the edges of his lips and a faint tremor in his expressive hands.

“What?”

“Look, save the martyr routine for someone else, okay?  I got enough of it when I was a kid.  Just go.  I’ll manage.”

“ _What_?”  This time it wasn’t confusion but disbelief in Steve’s voice, but Stark didn’t seem to notice the difference.

“Like you don’t know what I’m talking about…”  Stark trailed off, peering more closely at Steve.  “Jesus, you really don’t.”  Stark wiped a hand over his face and put his hands on his hips, staring hard at the ground between his bloody feet for a moment before blowing out a harsh breath, squaring his shoulders, and trying again.

“You’re obviously better cut out for this impromptu backpacking trip than I am.  You’re stronger and faster than I am out of the suit, and the only badges I got in the Boy Scouts involved science and technology, though I did learn a few skills that weren’t in the handbook.” 

Stark’s leer was unmistakable, and Steve felt himself flushing, though he didn’t rise to the obvious bait.  He was a fairly quick study and had learned a lot about sparring with Stark in the months since they’d saved New York from the Chitauri.

“I’m not leaving you alone, Stark,” Steve started, but Stark interrupted him with an imperious gesture.

“Nobility, honor, never leave a man behind, blah, blah, blah.  Be realistic.  Who’s got a better chance of getting out of here—wherever _here_ is—and getting help?”

“I do, but—”

“And who’s better equipped to build a fabulous sylvan retreat in the middle of nowhere using only his genius intellect and world-renowned sense of style?”

“You are, but I don’t th—”

“Right, so it’s settled.  Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints, send me a postcard when you reach civilization.”  Stark turned his back and started foraging in the sparse undergrowth. 

They were at approximately eight thousand feet, Steve estimated, and the forest they’d been hiking through was thinning to give way to bare rock and talus slopes.  Mercifully, there was no snow, but the temperature had dropped several degrees in their morning’s slow climb.  Now, at midday, it was temperate enough for Steve, dressed in a Henley, jeans, and running shoes, to be comfortable. 

Tony, who’d obviously been snatched from his workshop or possibly his sleep—maybe both—must already be chilly.  By nightfall…

“You’ll freeze to death before I can bring help,” Steve said.  “We’ve got maybe four hours of daylight left, and this is probably as warm as it’s going to get up here.  You won’t make it, Stark.”

Stark didn’t bother to turn around.  He’d begun gathering fist-sized rocks, stacking them in neat pyramids on the nearest flattish surface.

“Stark!”  Steve Rogers had always been a fairly patient man, the sort who liked to let people hang themselves on their own words rather than argue.  Tony Stark had so far proven to be the only person Steve had ever met who could infiltrate his calm without any apparent effort.

Obviously content with his rock piles, Stark had moved on to gathering kindling.

Steve took a long breath through his nose, held it to a count of six, and then let it out through his mouth in a huff.

“Tony,” he said then, more quietly, and finally Tony deigned to turn around to face him, hands clutched around a ridiculous assortment of twigs and some dried lichen he’d pried from the weather side of an exposed rock face.

“I’m not going to leave you alone on this mountain.  We’ll survive this together or die trying.  Okay?”

Despite his conciliatory tone, Steve had reflexively crossed his arms and spread his feet the way he did when he was expecting a confrontation.

But all the push seemed to have drained from Stark, who sagged visibly around the shoulders and let his burden go, tinder scattering around his feet like the world’s least organized bird’s nest.

“Fine.”  One word, clipped and heavy.  Around his eyes, resistance faded to be replaced with exhaustion.  Steve knew that the circles there couldn’t be attributed solely to their day’s ordeal.  Since he’d returned from his impromptu road trip, Steve had noticed that Stark had been more than usually preoccupied, putting in long stretches in his laboratory, emerging only long enough to reload on coffee, booze, and cold leftovers.  He’d assumed Stark had been nursing a sulk over something—maybe having to work with Steve, even.

But there was something oddly diffident in Stark’s manner now, some force driving him to compliance that Steve neither knew nor understood.  He was tempted to ask, but he knew he’d get only more deflective sarcasm.  He’d have to settle for begrudging submission.  Tony Stark on his knees, however he got there, was a kind of victory.

Steve studiously ignored the frisson of heat slithering through his belly at that particular mental image.

Tony suggested that they explore ahead of them, where a game trail disappeared around an obscuring rock face, to see if there weren’t a natural declivity that might offer them shelter.  They gathered firewood from the stunted evergreens that grew around the rocky trail, and moved on, eventually discovering a shallow cleft beneath the overhang of a jutting rock.

Tracks and scat suggested that they were not the first warm-blooded creatures to take shelter in the ersatz lean-to, but they seemed to be the first to build a fire there.  While Tony worked on getting it started, Steve reconnoitered the area and gathered more firewood.

Scaling the rock that provided them scant shelter, Steve discovered a sobering perspective:  For as far as even his exceptional eyes could see, nothing but green slopes and naked peaks, wave upon wave of them breaking against the far horizon.  By the sun’s position, he knew he faced west, and though the outcropping gave him a 120-degree sweep, there was nothing, not a single sign of human habitation—no cellphone towers, power pylons or fire-lookouts, not even a jet contrail high overhead.

It was impossible in the twenty-first century to be so isolated.  Or so he’d thought.

When he returned to the fire, Steve had intended to share his news with Stark, but when he caught sight of Stark’s face, lit from below and saturnine in the play of shadows across his cheek, he experienced misgivings.  Stark looked pale, exhausted, strung too tight with the day’s exertions and the bewildering fact of their abduction.

Instead of burdening Stark with yet another in a long list of unsolvable riddles, Steve crouched to stack the firewood he’d collected in a neat pile with what was already there and then swiveled on his haunches to sit beside Tony beneath the sharply angled overhang.  There was just enough room for them both, shoulders touching, and for Tony to sit without hunching.  Steve had to bend his head to avoid banging the crown of it against the unforgiving rock above. 

Still, for as uncomfortable as that position would undoubtedly become, he couldn’t bring himself to move away just then.  It was a measure of Tony’s state of mind that he didn’t object to their closeness, and Steve himself… well, he had his own reasons for not objecting.

It had been a long time since Steve had sat in silence beside a crackling fire next to a comrade in arms as night fell.  If it wasn’t precisely companionable, the quiet was, at least, not strained.  Maybe Tony was too tired to snark, or maybe he’d decided there was no margin in complaining.

Whatever the case, it was nice, though it raised in Steve a sharp stab of nostalgia and longing for brothers long gone down into their graves.

It couldn’t last, of course, Stark being Stark and their situation so dire.

“What did you see?” he asked as the last pale light limning the limits of their sight succumbed to the stifling darkness. 

“Nothing,” Steve answered, honesty lending bleakness to the word.

“We’re well and truly fucked.”

Steve resisted the urge to tsk over Stark’s language, not the least because he was tired of the man-out-of-time teasing but also because Tony wasn’t wrong.

“Not yet,” Steve settled on, figuring it was the safest of several responses, at least one of which would have shocked Stark speechless, Steve suspected.

“You have some great plan, oh savior of the masses?”

“Cut it out,” Steve said then, more sharply than he’d intended.  “I’m no more a savior than you are.  Or no less,” he added, emphasizing the last word by taking a chance and bumping Stark’s shoulder with his own.

“Yeah, I’m a real hero.”  The bitterness was sharp enough to cut his breath in half, and Steve swallowed what he’d been about to say—something glib and safe.

“You kinda are,” Steve reminded him.  “To a lot of people.”

Beside him, he felt Stark shifting uncomfortably.

“What I am is good at self-publicizing.”

“Stark—,” Steve started and then stopped, gathering himself.  “Tony, you sacrificed yourself for strangers—to save the _world_. You almost died.”

Stark waved a dismissive hand, though the gesture lost something in translation when he shivered visibly in the middle of it.

Night had fallen hard, and their little fire was dwarfed by the encompassing darkness beyond its feeble reach.

“You’re cold.”

“I’ve been colder.”

Steve thought of captivity and caves and the unfeeling blue glow of the arc reactor.

Then he thought of ice.

“So’ve I,” he deadpanned, trying to cut through the tension that sang like a wire in hurricane wind between them.

Stark’s responding snort was a kind of reward, and Steve felt proud all out of proportion to the accomplishment.

“Let me?” Steve asked quietly in the lull that Tony’s truncated laugh left.

He felt Stark’s shrug through his shoulder and lifted his arm accordingly, bringing Tony closer, until he was tucked against Steve’s side.

“Better?”

Stark’s head moved against his bicep in acknowledgement.

When Stark spoke again, Steve could feel it through his own chest.  It made him want to shiver for reasons having nothing to do with the cold.

“Do you remember what happened—how we got here?”

Steve shook his head.  He didn’t.  He’d been taking the stairs from his apartment down to the street.  He’d been going to buy milk.  The next thing he knew, he was waking up on the hard ground beside an unconscious Stark.

He said as much, and Stark nodded along.

“I was in my lab.  I think I’d passed out or fallen asleep or something.”  He made a gesture that indicated the why of it didn’t matter, but Steve wondered if Tony had been drunk. 

Steve wasn’t a square; just because he couldn’t get drunk himself didn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate the need to be inebriated.  But he did worry about Tony’s excesses—all of them, not just the drinking.  Now didn’t seem like the best time to bring them up, though. 

“Next thing I remember, I was here with you, which is weird, because JARVIS should’ve alerted me.  There should’ve been an alarm, at the very least.  My security systems aren’t easy to get around, and the lab is the most secure room in the whole place.”

“So you’re thinking inside job?”  Steve let all of his weariness into the question.  It had been decades since he was an innocent kid looking up to his heroes without question, but until recently he’d managed to retain some basic faith in humanity.

That faith was getting a little shopworn.

“Had to be.”

They chewed on that in mutual silence for a while.

Against his ribs, he felt Tony shiver, and he absentmindedly ran his hand up and down Tony’s bare arm.

“So what’s their endgame?  If they wanted us dead and were close enough to us to capture us and put us here, they could have killed us already.  What’s the point of this…”  Steve trailed off, unsure of how to describe their ordeal.

“Torture,” Stark supplied.  “We’re being punished.”

“For what?”  Steve sounded genuinely outraged, like his character was being impugned.

Stark’s bitter chuckle did things to Steve’s insides that he manfully ignored.  “You might be the Boy Scout in Chief, Cap, but I’m hardly a blushing innocent.  I’ve made a lot of enemies.”

He ignored, too, the sarcastic shot at his lily-white, wholesome American image, focusing with an act of sheer will on the actual point at hand. “Inside S.H.I.E.L.D.?” 

“I can think of only one person in S.H.I.E.L.D. who’d want to teach both you and me a lesson.”

“Fury,” they said then in unison.  Steve’s voice held a wealth of bitterness equal to Stark’s.  They were united, at least, in this mutual, well-warranted mistrust of the director.

“Well, fuck me,” Stark said at last, his tone betraying a certain admiration at the director’s cunning.  Steve caught Stark’s ironic smile out of the corner of his eye—Steve didn’t appreciate Machiavellian intrigue the way Stark did, but he did appreciate the way the expression made him look.  In the firelight, Stark looked like the prince of hell, all sardonic, infernal grace, and maybe inspired by that thought, Steve threw caution to the wind.

“That an invitation?” Steve said.

Beside him, beneath his touch, Tony Stark went unnaturally still.

Steve had a long, painful moment of crippling self-doubt, reviewing what he’d just said, his lascivious tone, the proprietary hand he still had draped around Stark’s shoulders.  If he’d been thinking of hell before, he was definitely in it now.

And then Stark said, “Guess you’ve heard I’m a sure thing, huh, soldier?”  There wasn’t anything sweet in Stark’s question, despite the treacle tone of it.  This honey was poisoned with something pernicious that suggested a depth of feeling Steve couldn’t begin to fathom.  He was so far out of his depth, he didn’t even know how he’d ended up in this conversation.

As he flailed around for an appropriate response, Tony eeled out from under his arm, threw a leg over his thighs before Steve knew what he was about, and settled himself in Steve’s lap.

Steve’s body betrayed his interest, in spite of his alarm and confusion, and he looked at Tony, eye to eye now, a wicked smirk painted across Tony’s lips, something darker riding at the corners of his eyes—challenge, maybe, and a kind of unholy desperation, too, the kind that said he’d light up a whole valley in purging fire to make a point, even if it meant dying in the process.

Steve put his hands on Tony’s waist and lifted him effortlessly away, taking care not to disturb the fire at their feet nor bang Tony’s head against the rock above them.

Tony made an awful sound, an ugly, hollow noise in the back of his throat, disdainful and somehow hurt at the same time.  “Don’t tell me you’re not that kind of boy, Cap.  I can see the evidence for myself.”

He directed a leer at Steve’s lap, where there was a very obvious bulge.

“Maybe the body is willing, but the spirit’s weak,” he offered, well, _weak_ ly.

“You gettin’ religion on me, Cap?”  Tony’s tone was brittle and false, and Steve felt himself drowning here. 

“What about Ms. Potts?” He grasped at her name like a lifeline. 

Tony’s shrug was a study in casual-not casual.  “We have a desert island clause.  I’m pretty sure it covers ‘about to freeze to death on a mountain in the middle of nowhere.’”

Steve was trying to work out what Tony meant without asking him when Tony added, almost too quiet to hear:  “Besides, we’re sort of in an off-again phase.”

Oh.

“And anyway, it didn’t stop you from practically begging me to fuck you five minutes ago.”

He knew he was being baited, knew enough of Tony’s defense mechanisms to recognize championship deflection when he heard it, but even so, Steve felt his face heating, and embarrassment started to gain precedence over his better nature.  He wanted to simultaneously _fuck_ the smirk off of Tony’s face and pound that face until it couldn’t make any discernible expression.  He was horrified by the violence of both urges, and it was that impetus that drove him from beneath the overhang.

“I’m going to do a perimeter sweep.”

“Sure,” Stark answered, breathlessly nonchalant. “Run away.”

Fists and jaw clenched equally hard, Steve stalked off into the darkness, thinking that he’d really like to run into a bear right about now, if only because that would be a fairer fight than him trying to figure out Stark.

It was at the furthest radius from their camp that Steve heard a sound, faint with distance but carrying on the cold, still air.  Despite the darkness and the treacherous ground beneath his feet, Steve made record time back to the fire, which had been abandoned.

Steve took precious seconds to build the fire up; he needed its light to scan the ground beneath the overhang for any signs of a struggle.  The thin mountain soil betrayed no sign he could interpret.

He knew better than to call out Tony’s name, but it was a mighty urge that required all his willpower to resist.  If Tony had been taken, there was a good chance whomever had snatched him was lying in wait for Steve, too, and it would do neither of them any good if Steve were captured by giving away his position.

Pretending for the benefit of potential observers to have found a trail on the bare ground, Steve stared at the earth and moved toward the nearest cover, a grouping of anemic, arthritic evergreens uphill and to the north of their camp.  He needed the scant protection the trees afforded so he could gain the trail he’d used earlier in the day to ascend the cliff above their position.  From there, he might have a better chance of spotting their assailants and figuring out where they’d taken Tony.

He was already calculating sightlines and engineering a makeshift slingshot in his head when the slither of pebbles over bare rock alerted him to the presence of an assailant lurking in the very trees he was stalking toward.

With ease born of years of necessity, Steve determined the exact location of the lurker, slid into the optimal position to overcome him, and launched himself at the dark shape that had detached itself from the stygian depths around it.

“What the hell, Cap!  Can’t a man see a guy about a horse without you going Defcon 1?”

Stark’s exclamation was somewhat muffled, coming as it was from beneath Steve’s full weight where he had Tony pinned to the ground.

“Tony?”  It took his adrenaline-clouded brain long seconds to process that the warm, thinly clothed body beneath his own was, in fact, Stark. 

“If you changed your mind, all you had to do was ask, Steve,” Tony drawled—a little more audibly this time, as Steve had started to push up and away.

He was stopped mid-push-up by the unmistakable movement of Tony’s pelvis against his own.

“C’mon, Steve.  It’s cold, I’m hot, we’re all alone…”  There was all the usual sexual swagger in Tony’s voice but also something hopeful, both in his tone and in the fact that he’d used Steve’s first name.  And Tony’s expression was… well, Steve might have called it vulnerable if he were feeling masochistic—once burned, twice shy where Tony’s defense mechanisms were concerned. 

But as it was, the tiny circular motions Tony was making were driving Steve rapidly to incoherence, so if he was going to be a gentleman here, he’d better hurry up and do it.

He took a deep breath and finished pushing away, bending down to offer Tony a hand up, a hand Tony ignored, working his way more slowly and stiffly to his feet, radiating hurt pride from the set of his jaw to his bare, abused feet.

“Gotta say,” Tony started, the wall of amused superiority already trapping his voice in the flatter register Steve was used to, when Steve interrupted him by shoving into his personal space, wrapping a hand around the back of his neck, pulling him up and in, and kissing him silent.

It was a good kiss.

Once Tony got past his initial surprise, he seemed to lose all resistance, opening his mouth with a bitten-off curse and molding his body against Steve’s.  Steve was momentarily stunned by the heat of Tony’s mouth and the almost vicious hunger of his teeth and tongue.  Steve might have initiated it, but Tony took it over, sliding his tongue in an insinuating rhythm against Steve’s even as he wrapped his arms around Steve’s waist and dropped one hand to his ass, pulling him even closer.

Steve felt his breath catch in his throat, his heart hammering against his ribs, felt blood pooling low in his belly and heat coiling up from his core.

He might have guided Tony to the cold, rocky ground and had his way with him right there if it weren’t for the fact that Tony began shivering, and not in the sexy way.

With deep reluctance, Steve pulled away from the kiss, dropping his hands to Tony’s shoulders and squeezing once before stepping back.

“Let’s get warm,” Steve suggested, holding out a hand as if he was offering to escort Tony to dinner.

Tony was too busy clenching his teeth together to keep them from chattering to answer, but he took Steve’s hand and let himself be led back to the fire, which was easy enough to blow into life once more.

Steve fed it patiently until it was blazing and then slotted himself into the space beneath the overhang and spread his knees, opening his arms in obvious invitation.  Tony hesitated a long moment, looking at something far away, something in his past or his future, maybe, and then crawled into the space Steve had made for him, back to Steve’s chest, head tucked against his collarbone.  Their legs touched from thigh to anklebone.

Steve wrapped his arms around Tony, nuzzled his temple, ghosted hot breath in his ear, and Tony’s sigh of contentment turned to a stutter, his hands coming up to grip Steve’s wrists as if to pry them away.

“Do you want me to stop?” Steve asked, but Tony rocked his head—no—and eased his grip, though he didn’t let go.

Steve took it slow at first, enjoying the way Tony’s breathing increased and the little, incoherent noises he made under his breath as Steve nibbled his earlobe, trailed his open mouth down the column of Tony’s neck, and then bit him where that smooth column met Tony’s broad shoulders.

Tony made a sound then, a choked-off shout, wordless and sharp, that drove a spike of need through Steve, so when Tony exploded from his arms and turned to straddle him, he didn’t object.

What followed was a kind of pillaging as Tony ravaged Steve’s mouth, biting his lower lip until he cried out and then thrusting his tongue down Steve’s throat, his hands everywhere, frantic and tearing, his hips thrusting hard against Steve until he could feel his zipper grinding into his hard cock.

When Tony backed off only long enough to pull his shirt over his head, Steve regained control of his faculties enough to grip Tony’s hips and force him to stop rocking.

“Hey,” he said, “Take it easy.  I’m kind of a sure thing here.”

Steve watched as Tony recognized the echo of his own earlier words.

“Sorry,” Tony said at last around a ragged gasp.  They were both breathing hard, hair sweaty at the temples, and Steve imagined his own mouth looked as well-kissed as Tony’s.  There was a line of stubble-burn along Tony’s jaw, and Steve leaned forward with slow deliberation to trail the lightest of kisses against it.

Tony relaxed as if Steve had thrown a switch, sagging against Steve, letting their chests brush.  He could feel the hard edge of the arc reactor against his own breast, and he looked down to see its light trapped between them, as if they were generating it by touching.

He sucked a kiss around the knob of Tony’s collarbone and then swiped the broad flat of his tongue across Tony’s pebbled nipple.

“Ah!” Tony cried softly, his hips beginning to move in helpless, tiny circles. 

Steve did it again, and then again, wringing quiet, breathless exclamations out of Tony, stretched out and helpless in Steve’s lap.

“God, the things I want to do to you,” Steve confessed, feeling his cheeks heat up.

“Anything—anything you want, all of it, just do it now, _please_ ,” Tony answered, voice strangled, breath coming in gulps.

Those words in that tone—abject subjugation, helpless, impossible submission—tore something out of Steve, and with a wrenching noise of his own, he flipped Tony and pressed him against the ground, plunging his hand into Tony’s pants.

Tony’s cock was hot in his hand, hard and smooth, already leaking, and Steve slid down his body, one arm across Tony’s chest to hold him down as he tasted the bitter fluid and took the head of Tony’s cock into his mouth, letting it rest heavy on his tongue.

Tony whined and tried to shove himself further into Steve’s mouth, but Steve’s weight across his thighs made it impossible.

Steve smiled at Tony’s impatience and took his time, exploring the head with his tongue before at last sliding down, taking in as much as he could and then sucking his way back up to the head to do it all over again.

Tony, reduced to “Oh” and “Uh,” was gorgeous in his abandon.  Steve looked up the length of Tony’s body to see him tossing his head from side to side, eyes squinched shut, mouth a red O of pleasure, neck corded and hands scrabbling at the dirt.

At last, Steve relented, easing his arm from Tony’s chest, wrapping that hand around the base of Tony’s cock, and settling into a steady, fast rhythm of sucking that brought Tony off moments later.

Tony spilled into Steve’s mouth with a cry that went on and on, carrying on the still, cold air.  Steve found himself rutting against the unforgiving ground and stilled only with immense effort.

“C’mere,” Tony mumbled a few moments later, pulling weakly at Steve’s shoulders with his hands.  Steve obliged, uncertain of what Tony wanted, exactly, until Tony made it clear by undoing his button and fly and shoving at his jeans and shorts until Steve felt the cold air on his cock.  And then Tony’s hands, one after the other, wet with his own spend to ease the way, took up a punishing rhythm.

Steve grunted and thrust down into Tony’s grip, which felt shockingly tight and impossibly hot. 

“C’mon,” Tony muttered, “Fucking come for me, Cap.  Come all over me, get me wet.”

Steve gasped and thrust harder, hips snapping, every ounce of his strength focused on fucking into Tony’s hands. 

“God, I want you to fuck me.  I want to spread my legs open and let you drive into me until I can feel your cock in the back of my throat.  I want you to flip me over and plow me like a fucking animal, Steve, I want you to—”

His name from Tony’s lips was what did it, the orgasm catching him by surprise, roaring through him, shoving a shout from between his clenched teeth.  It overwhelmed him, and he closed his eyes against the immensity of pleasure taking him apart.

“Look at me!” Tony commanded, and Steve obeyed on instinct, opening his eyes to watch as he spurted ropy white come over Tony’s belly and up onto the arc reactor, where it glowed like translucent pearls.

“God,” Steve said, his voice muffled over the thunder of blood in his ears.

“’bout time you recognized me,” Tony said, but Steve thought there was something gentle and warm in his voice.

Steve smiled—what he was sure was the goofiest smile in the history of the expression—and then had just enough presence of mind to collapse to one side instead of on top of Tony, who wore an expression like a canary-sated cat.

“Shut up,” Steve managed an eon later, when he’d finally caught his own breath.

“I didn’t say anything!” Tony answered, trying to sound put out but managing only well-fucked.

“Thor can hear your smirk in Asgard,” Steve observed.

Tony smacked him half-heartedly and then rolled until he was tucked under Steve’s arm, his damp cock resting on Steve’s thigh, the cooling spooge smearing from Tony onto Steve’s chest.

It was glorious.

A few minutes later it was still pretty great but also really cold and quite uncomfortable, not to mention sticky.  Tony had begun to tremble, and though Steve had a healthy enough ego, he knew he couldn’t take credit for Tony’s reaction in this case. They were damp with sweat, and during their…exertions…the fire had died back. 

Steve waited until Tony was as dressed as he was going to be before leaving their shelter to find more wood and once again get the fire going.  Then he resumed his place at Tony’s side, pulling him close.

“Get some sleep.  I’ll keep watch and tend the fire.”

“Boy Scout,” Tony sing-songed, but there was affection in his eyes when Steve glanced down at him, and Steve sketched a jaunty salute with the traditional three fingers.  Tony’s answering snort was distorted by a mighty yawn.

With Tony a trusting weight against him and the fire turning the rest of the world to impenetrable shadow, Steve had plenty of time to think.  He thought about Howard, but that made his belly twist, wondering what the man he’d so admired would think of what Steve had just done with his son.

Thoughts of Howard naturally led to memories of Peggy, which made him uncomfortable in a different way—not that he thought she’d mind Steve finding someone else to, well, care about.  But despite knowing that Peggy had moved on without him—a move he mourned but certainly didn’t begrudge—for Steve, their love was still a living feeling, not a memory softened by time, not a series of yellowed photographs on brittle pages.  Some small part of him felt guilty for betraying that love, and there was nothing rational about it, but that didn’t make it any less true for him.

His mind already on people he loved, it was natural to light upon Bucky, but that was far too painful for more than a glancing blow that made him actually wince and take a sharp breath.  Under his arm, Tony murmured and settled deeper into Steve’s embrace.

That left him with the one subject he’d been avoiding:  Tony himself, whose motivations had often been obscure to Steve and whose passions were sometimes dazzling but usually frightening in their intensity too. 

Steve liked the steady road; he liked taking the time, when he had it, to trace an action back to its cause and forward to its consequences.  Tony seemed to be the very epitome of impulse.  To be fair, Steve had figured out that because Tony’s brain worked faster than almost everyone else’s, it only appeared that he did things thoughtlessly, when in fact, he’d probably already calculated the odds…and then ignored them in favor of doing what he wanted anyway.

Steve sighed and shook these thoughts away.  It was his habit to analyze his own actions to death, picking them apart after the fact to discover every mistake, ferret out every weakness.  In this case, he didn’t precisely regret having had sex with Tony.  And being honest, he’d like to do it again.  And again.  And, well, yeah…

But he didn’t know what it might do to the team dynamic, and of course, Tony himself was a wild card.  He could wake up in a couple of hours and act like they hadn’t just had each other’s dicks in their hands, or he could leer and make lewd comments to get a rise of a different kind out of Steve or…

Steve sighed again and shifted a little, evoking a mumble from Tony that drew Steve’s eyes to his face.  At rest, he looked younger and somehow innocent, like there were still precious parts of him that hadn’t been abraded by life’s harshest lessons and then left hard and callused.

He was spared further maundering when Tony’s eyes opened.  He gazed blearily into the middle distance for a few moments and then seemed to recognize that he was cradled against Steve’s chest, at which realization he smiled, a tiny, genuine, warm expression that Steve was pretty sure he’d never seen before.

“Hey,” Steve breathed, afraid of breaking the moment somehow.

Tony’s only answer was to push a little away from Steve so that he could sit up straighter.  Steve counted it a win that Tony didn’t get up altogether.

“So, can we skip the awkward morning-after talk?  ‘cause for one thing, it’s still the middle of the night, but also, any weirdness that might arise should automatically be cancelled out by the circumstances.  We get a total pass for ‘we’re-probably-going-to-die’ screwing.”

At Tony’s words, Steve’s heart skipped a beat and his belly filled with icewater.  He guessed that Tony had decided that pretend-it-never-happened was the best way to deal with this whatever-it-was between them, and Steve was too honest a fool to lie to himself that it didn’t hurt a little.  Or maybe more than a little.

“Okay, so I guess we’re going with awkward morning-after silence instead…”

“No,” Steve said, fumbling to find the right words.  “No, it’s alright” –it really wasn’t—“I get it.  You, uh, are you, after all, and I’m, well, _me_ , and it’s not like we’re really compatible or anything, so—”

“I don’t know,” Tony interrupted.  “I thought we were pretty damned compatible there for a few minutes, at least.”  There was a leer in his voice, sure, but behind it Steve sensed something else, something his foolish heart hastened to identify as hopeful.

“The sex was great,” Steve agreed, keeping his own voice carefully neutral, trying not to betray that hope.

“But?” Tony prompted.

“But what?”  Steve was baffled.

“It sounded like there was a ‘but’ involved…”

Steve couldn’t help it.  He giggled like an eighth grade boy sneaking a peek at his older brother’s girly mags.  Beside him, Tony froze for a second and then started to snicker himself.

Soon enough, they were both cackling like stoned hyenas, the noise rebounding off of the rocks behind them and carrying on seemingly forever.

Steve’s ribs ached, and his cheeks were hot and wet with tears when they at last wound down to weary heaves, half laugh, half gasp, and then finally stopped, slumped together, almost boneless, weak with it.

He was exhausted, hungry, and cold, but Steve hadn’t felt this good in, well, decades, and right then and there he decided that if nothing else came of their time on the mountain together, this singular moment of shared, laughing abandon was well worth any heartache that came after it.  It wasn’t a private recognition of undying love, but it would do for now.

He was learning to make do in this century.

“Hey,” Tony said then.  “Thanks.”  There was something heartbreakingly vulnerable in that single word. 

“For?” he asked carefully.

He felt rather than saw Tony’s shrug.  They were still slumped together, shoulder-to-shoulder, hip-to-hip.  Tony was a warm line down his left side.

“You know.”

Steve thought he did, but he wanted to hear it, so he pushed a little, holding his breath, hoping it wouldn’t set Tony off.

“The great sex?”

It was Tony’s turn to snort.

Then, “Yeah, but...”  Quieter still, on a soft an expulsion of breath that sounded like it hurt to let go:  “The other stuff was pretty great too.”

Steve knew that was all he was going to get, and it was probably ridiculous that words so cryptic could make him break out into a goofy grin, but there it was:  Steve Rogers was secretly a twelve-year-old girl, and he didn’t care who knew it.

Instead of risking words, Steve laced his fingers through Tony’s and rested their joined hands on his thigh.

“Well, this is a touching sight,” a deep voice snarked out of the darkness beyond their fire.

Steve sprang to his feet, narrowly avoiding braining himself on the overhang, and put himself between Tony and the imminent threat.

Behind him, Tony made a noise of protest, but Steve ignored him, fixing his attention solely on the tall man who stalked out of the wilderness towards them.

“I mean, I’d hoped you two would get your heads out of your asses, but I confess that I did not foresee this.”  Fury sounded both a little perplexed and a lot smug, but his facial expression was, as usual, chillingly devoid of emotion.

Steve clenched his hands into fists.  A wave of fury surged through him, sweeping over his face, leaving it hot and his head hollow and light.  He felt like he had come untethered from the earth and at the same time that he could tear the mountain down around Fury’s ears.

“Hey, now,” Fury cautioned, hands going up in the universal _whoa_ sign.  “I didn’t come to fight.”

“You have a funny way of showing it,” Tony observed.  Steve’s rage had been so all-consuming that he hadn’t heard or felt Tony approach, only now noticing that he stood at his shoulder, almost but not quite touching, a solid wall of might against whatever Fury might throw at them.

“It worked, didn’t it?”  Fury made a gesture indicating their proximity to one another and their surroundings, which even now were starting to come into a dim, grey focus, dawn breaking slowly across the top of the world.

“Fuck you,” Steve said succinctly.  That startled an involuntary expression out of the director.  At Steve’s shoulder, Tony laughed, a short, grim sound, and agreed:  “What he said.”

“Let’s get down off this mountain, and we’ll talk about this,” Fury said.  It wasn’t really a suggestion.

“We’ll get ourselves down,” Steve said just as Tony taunted, “Make us.”

Apparently, Nick Fury wasn’t as omniscient as legend suggested, because for a brief but satisfying moment, he seemed flummoxed, taken aback by just how unified the two Avengers had become in their purpose. 

His confusion was fleeting, however, for in the next instant, Fury shrugged, palms up as if to say, _Have it your way_ , and turned to go without another word.

Steve’s satisfaction was replaced with growing unease as he was reminded of his hunger and of Tony’s exposure to the elements and their mutual exhaustion.  He teetered on the brink of swallowing his pride and asking Fury to wait, but just as the director’s leather-clad shoulders disappeared around the bend in the trail to their east, Tony wrapped warm fingers around his wrist.

Steve looked first at the grip on him and then into Tony’s face, where he saw both a wry self-awareness and a breathtaking faith—in him, in them, in whatever it was they had built out of darkness and desperation and need.

“I’m the smartest guy in the world, and you’re the Boy Scout in Chief.  We can get down off this mountain with a toothpick and three pinecones.  We don’t need him; he needs us.  Let him sweat.”

Steve paused for the time it took him to swallow his heart out of his throat, so full of want and fear in equal parts that he thought it might choke him.  Then he said, maybe a little more breathlessly than he’d wanted to, “You have a toothpick?  You been holding out on me?”

Tony snorted, let go of his wrist, stepped in front of him, and grasped his face in both hands, pulling him down for a brief but searingly hot and thorough kiss.

Now Steve was breathless for an entirely different reason.

“Let’s get off this mountain, Cap, so we can take a shower together and then get dirty all over again.”

Steve, never one to shirk duty when given a direct and sensible order, threw Tony a mock salute and got to work.


End file.
